End of Dales

The suburbs were waking and starting their weeks. Dale's head was pressed against a train window, watching the queues of cars idling as they glistened in the sunrise. Pressing Dale against that window was the flabby shoulder of a giant woman in a sundress. She'd eyed off the one remaining gap in the rows of facing bench seats in the carriage, put her index finger to the side of her lips to ponder and then backed herself in over two pairs of knees and filled the rest of the available space like a forkful of reheated curry landing on the middle of a keyboard. With gritted teeth Dale accepted that this was the tipping point that made the extra ten minutes of sleep worth less than the later train and tardiness it resulted in.

There is a pattern of body language cues that most peak hour commuters learn will help them escape to the exit without the need to speak whenever conditions get intimate. After the announcer declared Dale's stop as next he began the dance, sitting up straight, glancing sideways at the doors and putting his satchel on his lap. The ritual worked, but the cramped conditions slowed his progress and his feet barely arrived on the platform when the doors closed behind him and the train trundled away. Dale's usual perogative was to be the first to disembark to avoid the crowd swell around the turnstiles, today he found himself waiting to exit like everyone else.
His late arrival compounded, and with the whiff of lunchmeaty perspiration on his arm Dale felt a pang of surliness that his plan to impress Karl this week with his work ethic and professional grooming was already ruined. He wished he'd had a list of other priorities to fall back on.

At street level Dale engaged his upper-management speed strides to cover the distance remaining to the office with as much disdain for leisure as possible. He was still in second gear when he spotted Harold ahead of him, ambling at a less anxious pace. There were three options: catch Harold and listen to him talk the rest of the way; speed past with fake blindness and deal with the social guilt; or slow his roll and keep the current distance between them the rest of the trip – discarding any last hope of pseudo-punctuality. Dale voted for temporary blindness and put his head down to accelerate past the man. There was no evidence to suggest that Harold had any idea Dale was behind him. Somehow that did not stop him from being mid-sentence the instant Dale drew level.

'The air smells clean today,' he said. The speed went out of Dale's legs and he cringed as he slapped into the centre of Harold's conversational web.
'The air smells clean... today.' Dale parroted, clueless to how a statement like that should be answered but feeling his body traitorously locking into step with Harold's slower stride.
'Eventful weekend this one, for the world,' Harold stated. 'Did you see the news?'
The office loomed ahead of them but seemed to grow no bigger on the horizon as they walked. Dale felt like an interview subject being tortured by a tabloid reporter who meant to trick him into talking with open ended questions and uncomfortable silences.
'How was your weekend?' Dale asked. Finally sick of the awkwardness. 'Was there... weather?'
'Oh yes!' said Harold. 'So much to tell. And so unusual for this time of year.'
The conversation stopped abruptly as the walk brought the front of the office into view and the orgy of fire trucks and police cars was revealed. The building stood intact, but showed no sign of life or light. The two hurried closer and found the building supervisor standing in the delivery dock addressing the building's employees. Karl was not with them. Dale and Harold approached to listen when a loud bang and some crunching made him spin around. By the front doors a pair of firemen in hazmat suits were lifting two fabric walls of a cubicle assembly into a huge metal skip that was already full with more of the same.

'There has been a hazardous substance incident,' the supervisor was announcing. 'At this point we have classified the whole building as contaminated.'
There were worried murmurs from the crowd. A computer monitor and an armful of keyboards were hurled into the skip. Dale's mind turned to the fate of the last tub of yogurt he'd left the fridge over the weekend.

'What happened?' Joe asked. Dale wondered why that hadn't been his first thought, instead of yogurt.
'There is an investigation to come. We don't have any conclusive findings as of yet.
'What do we do now?' Miguel wanted to know.
'I saw Karl hurrying away with his laptop when I first arrived this morning,' responded Joe. 'Maybe he was going to the other city office?'
'Unfortunately,' the supervisor interrupted, 'due to our system of hot-desking and real estate utilisation we are already over legal capacity for workers at all our other offices. At this point if you have your laptop you can take it to our Alliance Partner McDonalds and use their free wireless, otherwise you are to return home to work as best you can and wait for further information. Someone will be in touch when we've organised alternative locations.'
Behind the supervisor Dale watched the firemen lift a cubicle wall with a Dilbert strip he'd seen every day still pinned to its padded surface onto the pile of the almost overflowing skip.
'That's all for now, please continue to check your emails over the course of the week.'

Dale left before the end of the sentence. He had lost count of the times he'd fantasized about the 9:30am train home. He did not want to wait for Harold. He knew in his heart that there was a high probablity that he would last less than a week at home before he drove back to the office in the middle of the night, dug his cubicle walls and coffee mug out of the dumpsters and reassembled his workstation in the middle of his living room. Until then he had a train station to make it to. He set off quickly, Karl style.